AT&T Researchers — Inventing the Science Behind the Service

Our work is focused on developing technologies that contribute to AT&T's world-class network and communications services. We also work to commercialize our intellectual property through new ideas, applications, and services.

The scope of our inventions is as broad as today's definition of communications. We have key patents in areas from network infrastructure to advanced IP communications services.

If you have an interest in any of the listed technologies, write us at attip@att.com.

MPEG Audio (Advanced Audio Coding)
MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) defines the standardized elements for the audio components of the MPEG International Standards. AT&T has patents essential to the practice of International Standards ISO/IEC 13818-7 and ISO/IEC 14496-3, also known as MPEG-2 AAC and MPEG-4 AAC.

Data CompressionVcodex is a platform of data transforms. A transform may encompass: different ways to compress data, different ways to encrypt data, translating data from ASCII to EBCDIC, etc. The uniqueness of Vcodex is that it provides an architecture that allows all of these different transforms to be programmable in a uniform manner and to be composed with one another to make up new transforms.

Vcdiff introduced the idea of "delta compression": compressing a piece of data knowing that it has some other related piece of data to which the de-compressor has access. As a part of doing compression, Vcdiff has to define a format to represent the computed data in bits and bytes that can be stored or sent elsewhere. This format is independent from how the algorithm computes the data, i.e., a decoder for it can be written without knowing how the data was computed. In recent trials, Vcdiff has been able to reduce a file to 0.6% of its former size.

Vctable is a database table compression algorithm that significantly reduces the size of a database table (structure and data).

Daytona®
The Daytona® database management system (DBMS) offers a full spectrum of data management and programming language services. This powerful DBMS goes far beyond the basics and provides previously unattainable power, e.g., a single Daytona DBMS server handles about 410 billion records in 40TB of disk space in a 24 x 365 environment.

Finite State Machines
The AT&T FSM LibraryTM is a set of UNIX-based general purpose software tools available for building, combining, optimizing, and searching weighted finite-state acceptors and transducers. Finite-state transducers are automata for which each transition has an output label in addition to the more familiar input label. Weighted acceptors or transducers are acceptors or transducers in which each transition has a weight as well as the input or input and output labels.

The FSM library includes about 30 stand-alone commands to construct, combine, determine, minimize, and search weighted finite-state machines (FSMs). These commands manipulate FSMs by reading from and writing to files or pipelines.

Grammar Library
The Grammar Library (GSM) is a set of general purpose software tools for constructing, modifying, and compiling grammars into efficient representations such as in a Finite State Machine (FSM). The GRM functionalities include:

AT&T Visualization of Massive Data Sets
Visualization of Massive Data Sets (VMDS) is a powerful system that provides a visual display of massive network data sets. VMDS allows network managers to isolate anomalies by interacting with 3D maps and simple graphs to reroute traffic thereby ensuring seamless network performance. The VMDS visualization technique is very flexible and can be used to analyze any network data that involves transactions, map locations and relationships between discrete entities. VMDS also allows multiple sites to view the same data and to work collaboratively.

Raptor - Rapid Application Programming Tool for OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
Raptor is a unique OLAP/data warehousing system for creating custom online reports. Using standard data sources, the tool can generate reports in specified formats (text or graphs) using user-specified business rules. The tool provides the flexibility of predefining data drill-down paths for OLAP functionality. Reports can be preserved, updated, and shared with other users based on individual user and group security permissions. Users can also specify pre-defined report schedules and receive report execution notifications. All of these features are available to the end users through a standard web interface, requiring minimal or no user training.

Building Box Communications®
Building Box Communications® is a new technology for the design, creation, and deployment of IP-based telecommunication services. Building Box facilitates the rapid and cost-effective creation of distributed, multimedia, and device-independent communication services.

Building Box employs a modular method, with each new feature programmed independently as one or more "feature boxes". Because of AT&T's patented modular architecture, Distributed Feature Composition, new boxes compose automatically with all the other feature boxes in the system, building an ever-richer suite of communication services that run on any IP network.

The technology offers a solution to the feature-interaction problem, an historically intractable problem in telecommunications, and one of the most important, least understood problems facing the Voice-over-IP industry.

Frame Erasure Concealment
Frame Erasure Concealment algorithms, hide transmission losses in an audio system where the input signal is encoded and packetized at a transmitter, sent over a network, and received at a receiver that decodes the packet and plays the output.

ITU-T Recommendation G.711 defines standardized elements for packet loss concealment. AT&T patented technology is essential to the practice of Appendix I of G.711.

Elite - Enterprise Lead Input and Tracking Environment
Elite is a closed loop sales lead management system with a rule based mechanism to carry out a variety of tasks such as lead evaluation, lead scoring, lead distribution, alerting, reporting, and sales process monitoring and control. Essentially, business rules are entered into the system in "plain English" in a prescribed format and spawn various processes at the software level, which in turn culminate in specific actions by the system. In addition, the system is equipped with voice browsing, enabled by text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition capabilities.

Marketing Communications Platform
Marketing Communications Platform is a powerful capability for personalizing and disbursing marketing contents in an automated fashion based on the profile of the recipients. The capability emcompasses email communications, collaterals, brochures, and any similar communication media, where the contents of the communication material are customized based on the profile of the recipients and driven by a set of business rules that can be adapted to fit various scenarios.

Real Time Data
Real Time Data is a product and service offering that monitors a company's network traffic efficiently, accurately and in near real-time. It has a variety of applications from network diagnostics to fraud monitoring and detection. The system can also provide immediate data for instant marketing campaigns.

Distributed Firewall
The Distributed Firewall technology provides the full protection of a firewall to all devices, regardless of their location. Cryptography, rather than topology, is used for inside/outside distinctions. A central management station requires that certain patches be installed before a machine is considered fully "inside," and hence trusted.

Global Fraud Management System
Global Fraud Management System is a robust suite of data mining and management applications to reduce fraud-related losses and enable quick reaction to market developments. This system enables businesses to evaluate and act upon critical business information such as usage management, instant marketing and consumer behavior.

MELPe
The MELP (Mixed-Excitation Linear Predictive) vocoder is the new 2400 bps Federal Standard vocoder. MELP-enhanced or MELPe provides a 1200 bps option and speech enhancement. The U.S. Government and NATO Partners for Peace have products made for them that use MELP and MELPe.

MPEG-4 Video
AT&T has a portfolio of patents with claims that are essential to the practice of International Standards ISO/IEC 14496-2 and 14496-10, also known as MPEG-4, Part 2 and MPEG-4, Part 10. MPEG-4 Video compression enables the efficient recording, streaming and playback of consumer and commercial video content. It is currently widely in use in computer software applications, mobile handsets, set-top boxes, cameras, camcorders, and personal media players.